Varieties of compatibilism - complete

Varieties of compatibilism

If you believe that free will is consistent with picture of the
universe in which everything happens out of mechanistic necessity then
you are a compatibilist. On the other hand if you believe that free
will is inconsistent with determinism then you are an incompatibilist.
There are a variety of approaches that compatibilsits have taken.

Different approaches to compatibilism each start with some analysis of
what it means to act freely. The literature I have come across suggests
that the following intuitive analyses are made of free action:

- We believe that someone acts freely - acts of their own free will
- only in so far as it is true that they could have done otherwise
[Underdetermination]
- We believe that someone acts freely - acts of their own free will
- only in so far as the action they perform is one that they own or
identify with [Ownership]
- We believe that someone acts freely - acts of their own free will
- only in so far as the action they carry out is one for which they
can be held accountable. [Accountability]

Each compatibilist position then seeks a property that will make one of
the above claims come out true.

1. Underdetermination
I am not sure that all approaches adopting the claim that that to act
freely an agent must be able to act otherwise at the time of acting
(i.e., that the future is somehow open) are strictly compatibilist for
they can be interpreted as limitations upon determinism rather than as
ways of reconciling free action with determinism.

If all action has antecedents the underdeterminist must show that the
antecedents to a particular action are somehow also compatible with the
agent not performing the action. But how can this be done in a
mechanistic fully determined universe?

Popper's ("Open Universe") approach, of course, is to suggest
that the fundamental laws of nature are probabilistic rather than
deterministic. This would mean that when an agent acts freely the
antecedents of the action or choice do not fully necessitate it. This
means that it is possible that with precisely the same antecedents a
different choice might have been made.

In "Leviathan" Thomas Hobbes suggests that we need to break the
antecedents of action into different classes and only consider some of
those classes of antecedents. Hobbes's line is that people act freely
when other people do not put hindrances in the way of what they choose
to do. Of course a person is still determined by his history and his
neurology and biology, but Hobbes considers such determination as
compatible with free will.

A number of philosophers have suggested that Hobbes approach can be
broadened as follows. Each particular context of conversation will
suggest particular classes of antecedents that are relevant to free
action. For example in a court room psychiatric antecedents to an
action may be discussed. In such a context, an agent is said to act
freely if those antecedents relevant to that context do not impede the
person's action. Again other neurological or historical antecedents
may have determined the person's action, but since they are not
relevant to the particular context of discussion, the person is said to
act freely in that the relevant antecedents underdetermine his action.
This approach amounts to a kind of relativity: To be free is to be free
from a particular class of antecedents relevant to that context of
discussion.

2. Freedom as identification or ownership
Many philosophers criticize the idea of underdetermination as being
purely negative. They say that underdetermination cannot distinguish
between a purely random action and a considered and rational action.
They suggest that freedom of action has to be positively construed in
order for the true essence of free will to be captured. They find the
positive requirement for free action in the notion that an actor must
identify with or own the action. If the agent identifies with his
choice, claims it as his own, and states that it was not forced upon
him, then the agent acts freely.

Donald Davidson (in his essay "Actions, reasons and causes"), for
example, suggests that if an action is brought about by an agent's
beliefs and desires "in the right way" then the agent is acting
freely. His idea is that action is free to the extent that it is the
product of a person's beliefs and desires as opposed to reflexes,
accidents, coercion, or any other antecedent unrelated to the normal
generation of a person's beliefs and desires. So the fact that
beliefs and desires are the outcome of a person's history and
neurology and biological heritage has no bearing on free action in this
view. In deflationary terms this view amounts to the claim that an
agent who acts on his desires and beliefs acts as he wishes to act, and
could have acted differently had he so wished. (One can wonder: Is it
possible that the agent could not have wished otherwise?)

The Davidson approach has been attacked by a number of philosophers on
the grounds that agents do not necessarily identify with or own an
action just because it originates from their beliefs and desires. Harry
Frankfurt ("Freedom of the will and the concept of a person") for
example talks about "wanton" desires, and Jon Elster ("Sour
grapes") discusses a similar category of beliefs, where such desires
and beliefs are not identified with by the acting person. A wanton
desire is one which comes and goes without the consent of the person
concerned. A homosexual person may agree that he or she desires sex
with a person of the same sex, but may refuse to own that desire.

Daniel Dennett in his book "Elbow room" pursues this critique,
adopting Frankfurt's idea that to act freely means not just to act
from desires and beliefs "in the right way", but to act from
desires and beliefs that the agent desires to have. This approach means
that we have to distinguish first-order from second-order desires and
beliefs. Free action in this view is action that stems from desires and
beliefs that the agent has approved at a second-order of control. Still
one may wonder whether the mere fact that a homosexual man may be
persuaded to accept his sexuality (hence approve it at a second order
level) is sufficient to convert actions based on the desire for
same-sexual partners from un-free to free. (See K. Vihvelin's essay,
"Stop me before I kill again." for a critique).

3. Accountability
Someone who acts freely is thought to be accountable for what they do.
For example, we can assign praise or blame to them only if they acted
freely and if the outcome of their action was good or bad. A person who
acts freely, then, in this view takes responsibility for what he does.
This approach to compatibilism then focuses not on the degree of
underdetermination in the causal order, nor on the "right way" in
which the actions originated, but on the possibility that the action is
subject to judgement. The reasoning process of the first two approaches
is reversed: The fact that a person is accountable for his action is
taken as the fundamental fact from which freedom of action can be
inferred.

Moral philosophers often reiterate the maxim that "ought" implies
"can". If you want to hold someone accountable for what they have
done then they must have the capacity to act in the normatively
prescribed way. In the accountability approach to compatibilism the
fact of accountability, the fact that action can be adjudicated, is
taken as given and from this fact free will is inferred.

The accountability approach considers an actor's action as
accountable in relation to the excuses that an actor can offer for his
action. An agent acted freely, in this view, to the extent that the
normally acceptable excuses for the action are not available to the
actor. In other words, if the antecedents for an action do not include
any antecedents that we would normally regard as excuses then the actor
acted freely. (This line of thinking seems to be closely related to the
extensive research into excuses in attribution theory).

Not all philosophers taking the accountability approach to
compatibilism construe the action in relation to excuses . Some argue
from the abstract idea that no society could function if responsibility
and accountability were not acknowledged. In this view, an agent acts
freely when the antecedents of an action are consistent with the agent
being held accountable for his action by the larger society (see H
Hart, "Punishment and responsibility"). In other words, antecedents
that can render an action un-free are those recognized by the larger
society, in terms of that society's law and morality, as capable of
nullifying or reducing the actor's answerability for his action.
Since law and morality differ across societies, and since they evolve
and change in particular societies, this approach to compatibilism can
be construed as relativistic. An actor's action may be construed as
free in one society but as un-free in another. In our own society, for
example, soldiers running from battle were executed as cowards in the
First World War, but today would be regarded in many cases as suffering
from PTSD.

P F Strawson (in his essay "Freedom and resentment") disregards the
notion of law and morality but instead emphasizes the reactive
standpoint that ordinary people spontaneously assume in dealing with
others. The feelings of gratitude or resentment, the so-called reactive
attitudes, signal to us that we hold people responsible for what they
have done. P F Strawson suggests that such attitudes would make no
sense otherwise. Holding people responsible for what they have done is
the corner stone, in Strawson's view, for our capacity to maintain
interpersonal relations with them. If we have to change our view of
them from the active view to the objective view then we see them as no
longer accountable for their actions. When my mother, suffering from
Alzheimer's, fails to recognize me, I can not appropriately feel
resentment - instead I have to see her behaviour as un-free, as
arising from her condition. So, according to P F Strawson, a person
acts freely to the extent that the antecedents of his actions allow us
to maintain a reactive attitude towards him and his doings.

S Wolf ("Freedom within reason") offers a version of the
accountability approach to compatibilism that starts from the idea that
people are essentially concerned with keeping track of the values they
accept. On this view, if we view people as value trackers, we can see
them as acting freely and as responsible for their action, just in so
far as we can regard them as responsive to those values. If on the
other hand these people no longer respond to their values, but behave
according to whatever desire strikes them, then they no longer act
freely. My mother, for example, normally would value contact with and
keeping track of her children, but Alzheimer's has robbed her of the
ability to track her values so that she is no longer acting freely.

The accountability approach seems closely related to the other two
approaches to compatibilism. To hold someone accountable for what he
has done seems to imply that we believe that he could have done
otherwise (e.g., if none of the acceptable excuses apply); and to hold
someone accountable for what he has done also implies that we believe
his actions were not dictated by others through coercion, or through
psychiatric disease, or the like, but instead arose through internal
process that he can claim as his own.

I am sure there are other approaches to compatibilism, but it seems to
me that most can be fitted into the above framework, and will differ
from what is presented here primarily in the details by which they are
realized. This review has not really attempted an evaluation of these
approaches, or of the enterprise of compatibilism. It has simply tried
to provide a scheme to classify and think about them.

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